Geo-fence warrant

And then there was nothing for eight years.

Nothing at all until last term, a case called Chantry versus United States, which dealt with that historic cell location information, the Google information that I told you about, and something called a geofence warrant.

Geofence Warrant is where the government says, we know that a crime was committed at such and such a place at such and such a time.

Google or whoever the provider is, we want all the cell phones that were within a certain amount of space within a certain amount of time that passed through there.

And then we'll suss through them and tell you who we want to talk to and you have to give us those cell phone owners.

It's the government's access to a comprehensive, comprehensive retrospective database.

Now, the part that matters for advice, but the court did not decide, it did not hold that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional.

It vacated and remanded for probable cause and particularity at each of the three stages.

It did not resolve good faith, and it expressly reserved tower dumps, reverse keyword warrants, license plate readers, and purchase broker data.

But the fact that this data is available is the problem.

Now, the laws around geofence warrants are unresolved.

In August 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States ruled that the geofence warrants are unconstitutional general warrants under the Fourth Amendment.

In the same era, the Fourth Circuit went the other way and held that pulling that kind of limited location history was not even a search.

So depending on where you are in the country, the courts disagree on whether this is legal at all.